1. To give students a visual picture of who the characters in the novel are, we watched two movie trailers. The first was the original one with Gregory Peck introducing the film. The second was a recently created one done by a student for an English project. The tension built in the second, though, was clearly more effective because it catered more to what we expect of movies today – to catch our interest with conflict-building music and the potential for violence! It was just interesting comparing the two videos.
2. We continued reading the novel, although we didn’t listen to the audio version of it on tape this time.
3. Students have a representing assignment where they have to either represent the Radley house or Boo Radley himself. They have to find information from the novel that gives the reader an impression of either of these things and then represent it with their own drawing. It also must include a 3-dimensional type of element, such as the chicken feathers in the example I showed them.

See what you think of these movies trailers. The first is the original, with the second being the recently created one.

Here is the second….